I'd argue the Wayland hate is much worse. Not that it might be bigger than the hate on systemd, but contrary on the case of the systemd, there are no other real alternatives to wayland nor x. Wayland is attempting to improve over x but some (really noisy) people just suffer from fear of the new.

There are ~three groups in the systemd debate.

People who grew up on sysvinit based service management and can't handle change (the partially straw man group you are complaining about).

People who only know about sysvinit based service management and systemd and formed their opinions of systemd based on "sysvinit == terrible confusing shell scripts; systemd == config files" (you - as a first impression).

And people who actually know the advantages, disadvantages, and functional details of sysvinit based service management, systemd, and the plethora of other attempts/approaches at solving these issues and can support their arguments in favour of or against systemd with actually reasoned arguments.

The first group is easy to ignore, and a minority. The third group produces the biggest chunk of well informed content on systemd. And the second group seems to think that anyone in the third group who is in favour of systemd, must be one of them, and anyone who is against systemd, must be in the first group (note also: the false dichotomy).

Rather than straw manning your opponents in this discussion while pretending this is a discussion of the pros and cons of "declarative service management", could you instead contribute something useful? Lacking that, maybe just stop trying to contribute?

By saying stuff like this, you aren't going to convert sysvinit users to anything and you aren't going to convince anyone who has genuine criticism of systemd of anything.

But haven't you heard that systemd is an evil project made by Microsoft to somehow destroy Linux and make everyone use Windows? It must be true because I saw it on Reddit.

That is a strawman. That is not the aspect of systemd people object to.

Yeah Wayland I get. It's still kind of janky even after almost 20 years. Complaining about Systemd makes no sense though. It works very reliably, switching to it caused no issues, and it has fixed a number of problems with the Linux desktop.

Some people just want to live in the 80s forever.

Systemd sucks though for good reasons.